One of the main selling points of iOS is its clean and simple look. Apple has invested a lot of time and effort in designing the beautiful and intuitive user interface. The design must be good because it has “inspired” other phone OS’s to come up with a similar look.

But each person has different tastes. Users love to add their personal touch to everything they own. While iOS can be customized, some elements of the UI come with minimal customization options, one example being the iOS lockscreen. The only official personalization you can do to it is change the background image. Fortunately, there’s a solution. If you have a jailbroken iOS device and you want to customize your lockscreen, there are countless ways to do it. This is one of them.

Let’s Go Shopping

There are many reasons why people jailbreak their iOS device, but I guess the most popular one is to be able to change the look and feel. You can do this by activating Winterboard and applying a theme or two. There are lots of themes that you can find on Cydia, and choosing one among many is not an easy task. So I started my quest with the good old search engine.

I found that one of the good looking popular themes is LockMS. You can get the theme via Cydia. Just tap the search tab and type in the name. Tap LockMS from the result and tap the “Install” button on the top right corner of the screen.

I took the screenshot after I installed LockMS, so the install button is replaced by “Modify“.

As mentioned above, you’ll need Winterboard to be able to run themes. You can download and install it independently, but the app should be installed automatically along with the first theme that you download. But the theme alone is not enough. To further customize your lockscreen, you need other applications from Cydia. The first one is “CleanStatus“. This app will let you customize which screen information you want to display or hide.

The next one on our shopping list is “Lockscreen Clock Hide“. As the name suggests, this app will hide the big clock on the lockscreen so that it won’t overlap with the clock from LockMS.

And the last one of the pack is MiniSlider. This app will reduce the size of the lock slider so that the slider will not block LockMS.

If you want to completely hide the lock slider, you can use one of these themes along LockMS: “Hide Slide to Unlock” or “No Slider“. I don’t use them because I feel more comfortable having the unlock slide on the lockscreen.

Let The Game Begin

With all the ingredients ready, we can start the customization process. Go to “Settings” and scroll down to the Winterboard.

Then tap “Select Themes” to view the theme list.

You can find all the installed themes here. Tap on the ones you want from the list. LockMS comes in several flavors. They are the basic version, the 24-hour version, the version with the “Tap To Unlock (TTU)” feature, and the one with invisible TTU. To enable our customization, choose one of the LockMS themes and MiniSlider.

After choosing the theme, go back to the WinterBoard main screen and tap “Respring” to activate the theme.

After that go to the CleanStatus screen from Settings and disable the icons you don’t want by sliding their status to “On“.

Don’t forget to enable Clock Hide to complete the process.

And here’s the result of our customization. You can further customize the theme (such as adding a background image) by going to the “Root – Library – Themes” of your iOS device with the help of an application like iPhoneExplorer. But a complete explanation on how to do this would take another article, and it would bring our discussion out from the “easy” realm.

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Al

August 29, 2011 at 7:58 pm

The calendar and time is at the bottom of the lock screen (rather like the bottom image on this page) with the slider obscuring half the info.
It should be like the image at the top of this page - with the calendar/time, etc towards the top of the lockscreen and the slider nowhere near it.

Jeffry - have you managed to do it this way or is the image at the top of the page lifted from another website?

That's the LockMS version called "top". The version is not bundled into the installer (I don't know why), and I used to have that version. But after I re-jailbreak my iPhone (iOS upgrade), I lost it. I'm still trying to find that version on the net, but no luck so far.

I was wondering the same thing and with a little research i found out you can get the image at the top of the screen by downloading the winterboard, typophone4 and the lockscreen clock hide, then you simply go into the winterboard select themes and make sure typophone4 is checked, respring the springboard and you're all good to go and you can have the image at with any wall paper behind it you want.

After several tries I still can't get the same result. Using the same apps (versions) and everything still no luck. I get the lock screen but the slider is the same big one or sometimes (depending on the version chosen on winterboard) a bigger one obstructing the time.

I don't know what's wrong with your settings. Maybe is the difference of iOS version? What version do you use? I use 4.3.3. Maybe you could try to restore and rejailbreak the phone before trying the process once again.